Dishfull Thinking - Comics by Matthew McGuigan

It's so weird to draw people talking on phones these days!  I was recently reading in a Calvin & Hobbes collection of mine that Bill Watterson felt it was dated to put rotary phones in Calvin's house, but he liked the look of them, so in they went.  I don't think it was a big deal in the late 80's, but I wonder if people would look at a rotary phone in a comic now and go "What the heck is THAT thing?" 

Nowadays landlines tend to be remote phones (no more curly cords to draw!), and people are mostly switching to having no land line at all!  When I started drawing, there were a number of elements that made up a phone that made it easy to identify and draw: a banana-like receiver, a blocky console with a number pad and saddle for the receiver, and a long curly cord to connect the two. 

Just draw a stickman holding a banana with a squiggly line going to a box, and you've successfully drawn something that is fairly easily identified as a person talking on a telephone.

Now almost all phones look like little black rectangles.  I suppose that's easier to draw than the banana squiggly line method, but it's definitely not as fun.